A significant share of the cost of operating the World Wide Web is underwritten by advertising. For example, the cost of providing informational web pages may be supported by displaying advertisements to each Internet user who accesses the web page. For this method to have integrity, the web-page provider must be able to give the advertiser an accurate account of how often the web page is visited, and presumably how many times the advertisement is viewed.
Providing an accurate count becomes difficult when the server periodically updates the content of the web page, for example when an HTML web page gives scores for sports events in progress. In this case, web browsers may automatically refresh to keep up with changes in the scores by re-accessing the web page periodically, commensurate with the content-update period of the web page. Each time a browser refreshes by re-accessing the web page, the server advances its count of how many times the page is viewed. Often, however, no human is present to see the advertisements when the browser automatically refreshes the updated web page. This means that a distortion is introduced by coupling the count of how many times the web page and its advertisements are viewed to the count of how many times the page is accessed.
Thus, in order to provide greater accuracy in counting how many times a web page is viewed, there is a need for a method and apparatus for determining whether an access to a web page is made explicitly under the control of a human user or is the result of an automatic web browser refresh.